What Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Movie About Porn Addiction Is Really About

Photo: Handout

AUSTIN, Texas — Joseph Gordon-Levitt made a movie about porn addiction. It’s sweet, funny, deeply emotional, and ultimately not really about porn at all. Instead, Gordon-Levitt’s movie is about the ways people create distance and engage superficially with the relationships in their lives — whether with lovers, religion or PornHub – without ever really connecting.

“I wanted to tell a story about how people objectify each other and how media often contributes to that, especially when it comes to love and sex,” said Gordon-Levitt at SXSW after the premiere of Don Jon, which he wrote, directed and starred in. “We learn a lot of expectations from movies, or TV shows, or commercials, or magazines, or pornography, and those expectations are unrealistic and maybe not so healthy. And if we’re busy comparing our own lives and our partners to those expectations, we’re doomed.”

To make its point, Don Jon (formerly called Don Jon’s Addiction) starts by throwing so much sex on the screen – both in the form of actual internet porn cuts and scenes between Don Jon (Gordon-Levitt) and the women he seduces – that it becomes almost meaningless. Viewers begin to see sex the same way he does: just another form of empty self-gratification.

At least until he meets and falls in love with Barbara (Scarlett Johansson, doing a brilliant Jersey girl), a woman who eschews pornography and won’t sleep with him after a night of dance-floor humping. What he learns in his relationship with Barbara – and through the advice of Esther (Julianne Moore, in top form) – is the hard lesson of what it means to be valued and devalued. It’s a fairly simple story, but one told with such empathy, humor, and panache that it’s hard not to be engrossed.

[Men and women] are corralled into roles based on their gender that are not necessarily healthy…. There are a lot of gender roles that are reinforced in a lot of Hollywood movies that I think are really problematic.

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

But while Don Jon’s path to enlightenment may be fairly ordinary, the character himself is an interesting lens through which to view issues of objectification in mass culture. He likes cruising for women with his friends (and sizing each lady up on a scale of one to 10), drives a hot rod, has fights about TiVo and football with his dad (a hilarious Tony Danza), and spends hours at the gym. Basically, he’s the exact guy you’d expect to treat any woman short of a Victoria’s Secret model as disposable, which is why his moments of self-realization and transformation are more powerful. (If there were ever a character who could learn something from the offerings of MakeLoveNotPorn, it’s Jon.)

It would be easy – and probably accurate – to mock his epiphanies with a sarcastic “aww look, the porn-addicted lothario got wise and realized women are people too. Let’s give him a medal.” But really the way Gordon-Levitt plays him it’s a transformation worthy of applause, if for no other reason than it feels painfully honest. Not to mention that the women in his film (Barbara specifically) reduce men to the functions they perform as well.

During his South by Southwest question-and-answer session, Gordon-Levitt told the audience he believes men and women today “are corralled into roles based on their gender that are not necessarily healthy…. There are a lot of gender roles that are reinforced in a lot of Hollywood movies that I think are really problematic,” adding that that he is both a feminist and a man with “womb-envy.”

Yet most of the men and women in his movie still fit very much into their stereotypical roles; they are caricatures of themselves, painted boldly to show the contrast. And while Gordon-Levitt’s film will probably never be interpreted as some grand statement on gender equality – it still doesn’t pass the Bechdel test – it deserves kudos for finding a way to turn a tale of one man’s struggle with web porn into a commentary on how modern media has changed the way human beings interact and connect with each other.

Gordon-Levitt spent much of 2012 in a string of great nerd flicks from Looper to The Dark Knight Rises, and while fans shouldn’t worry that he’s abandoning genre films for the world of indie cinema – he is signed up for Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, after all – with more movies like this from the actor and director, they might not feel screwed if he did.